Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language—the things people say and the ways they say them—shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.New edition of one of the founding works of Language writingAcknowledgments
My Life
My Life in the Nineties
“One major source of joy in reading My Life comes from the collision of various sentences and subjects. In that very collision—vaguely cubist or collagist—lies the humor and pleasure of this text, which is a kind of super-collider, a site for high-energy linguistic experimentation.”—Hank Lazer,Archive Newsletter
“My Life has so many good lines in it, it’s like a trot, it makes you want to steal from it or perhaps annotate it and make the compliment (or complement) of imitating it.”—Bernadette Mayer,L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
“Hejinian has for some time been noted for her love of rich textual surface effects, but never before has she found a method of construction so suited to its development.”—Ron Silliman,San Francisco Review of Books
“To read the twenty-first-century iteration of Hejinian’s poetic autobiography is to experience anew a poem that conceives of a life as an ever-unfolding process of recapitulations and echoes, expansions and contractions, discontinuities, recontextualizations, and accumulations. It presents life as a whole that is at once more than its constituenl³.
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